Chapter 1: Analyzing the Dearth in Family Enterprise Research

Family owned and controlled firms are the dominant form of business organization in the United States. Yet scholars of political economy, finance, and management assume an ownership structure characterized by widely distributed shareholders divorced from both management and governance of the firm. This chapter begins with an examination of family businesses in social science literatures and then explores the theoretical, historical, and sociocultural reasons for the incongruity between the type of business that is dominant in the United States and the type of business assumed and studied.